Beautiful “Buckshot” the Pheasant

This is Buckshot, the hen Pheasant. I stumbled across her as she was slowly bleeding to death in a hedgerow almost a month ago. She was riddled with tiny pellets from a shotgun blast and her left wing was completely shattered. Normally, when I come across game-birds or even so-called “nuisance” birds in this sort of condition, I feel obliged to put them out of their not inconsiderable pain and misery. However, there was something about the look in Buckshot’s eyes that made me think twice about despatching her and so I decided instead to take her home where I anaesthetized her with chloroform and operated on her to remove no less than nineteen pellets from various parts of her body and to patch up her wing as best I could. Subsequent infection was a strong possibility, but she survived the most critical period somehow and has seemed to thrive in a hospital cage up in my garden shed.I’ll be setting her free soon, despite the fact that she’ll never fly again. Pheasants aren’t particularly good fliers anyway, but as long as she can get to the lower branches of some convenient tree in order to roost, then she’ll probably be ok. Besides, not being able to fly could be an advantage, as it’s only when Pheasants are flushed by beaters and forced to take flight in the open that they end up being shot!Despite being a “proper” country boy born and bred and with a gamekeeper uncle and an old-fashioned-type herbalist grandmother as my childhood mentors, I’ve always despised the way that game-birds such as Pheasants are deliberately bred just so that dribbling idiots armed with popguns can get their “sporting” jollies from blasting them out of the sky! As I’ve commented elsewhere however, I would just love to have seen some of these guys (most of them wealthy townies nowadays) attempting to test their testosterone-driven shooting prowess against targets that actively return their fire….usually with a vengeance!You see, we used to use what you would call “proper” firearms back in my day….Weapons such as the old SUIT-sighted LM1A1 SL Rifle, with a killing range of more than half a thousand yards against an enemy often better armed than we were….In fact, you’d be amazed at the difference it makes to your determination to shoot stuff knowing that your own head could be made to explode like a water melon at any moment !As for the shooting of birds being lauded as a sport? I really don’t think so. Killing anything at all can never be justified as any kind of a sport as far as I’m concerned and I’m perfectly aware of how unpopular my outspoken opinions on the subject tend to be with a few of the country locals around here. Mind you, I don’t remember ever turning round to see any of THEM risking their own necks back in the 1970s and 1980s while on various recce foot patrols with anyone from my troop (or any other military unit for that matter), prowling the fields, lanes and hedgerows of the Irish border or the streets of Londonderry or Belfast at a time when things were so utterly depressing and when I eventually lost my very best friend to a sniper’s bullet….and the balance of my mind to the utter horror and futility of it all!